Neocon Collapse in
Washington and Baghdad by Jim Lobewww.dissidentvoice.org
June 2, 2004

Fourteen
months after reaching the zenith of their influence on U.S. foreign policy
with the invasion of Iraq, neoconservatives appear to have fallen entirely
out of favor, both within the administration of President George W. Bush and
in Baghdad itself.

The signs of their defeat
at the hands of both reality and the so-called "realists," who are headed
within the administration by Secretary of State Colin Powell, are virtually
everywhere but were probably best marked by the cover of Newsweek magazine
last week, which depicted the framed photograph of the neocons' favorite
Iraqi, Ahmad Chalabi, which had been shattered during a joint police-U.S.
military raid on his headquarters in Baghdad. "Bush's Mr. Wrong was the
title of the feature article.

The victory of the
realists, who also include the uniformed military and the Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA), appeared complete Monday with the unveiling of
the interim Iraqi government to which an as-yet undefined sovereignty is to
be transferred from the U.S.-led occupation authorities Jun. 30.

Not only was Chalabi's
archrival-in-exile, Iyad Allawi, approved by the Iraqi Governing Council (IGC)
as prime minister, but neither Chalabi nor any of his closest IGC
associates, especially Finance Minister Kamel al-Gailani – who is accused of
handing over much of Iraq's banking system to Chalabi during his tenure –
made it into the final line-up.

"It looks like Chalabi is
the big loser," said one congressional aide who follows Iraq closely. "And
neocon has become a dirty word up here," he added, referring to the
Congress, where Republicans have become increasingly restive as a result of
recent debacles in Iraq, including the scandal over the abuse by U.S.
soldiers of Iraqi detainees and leaks that Chalabi had been passing
sensitive intelligence to Iran, and may have done so for years.

"We need to restrain what
are growing U.S. messianic instincts – a sort of global social engineering
where the United States feels it is both entitled and obligated to promote
democracy – by force if necessary," said Senator Pat Roberts, a conservative
Kansas member of Bush's Republican Party and chairman of the Senate
Intelligence Committee, in a speech last week that was understood here as a
direct shot at the neocons.

The neoconservatives, a key
part of the coalition of hawks that dominated Bush's post-9/11 foreign
policy, were the first to publicly call for Saddam Hussein's ouster, which
they saw as a way to transform the Arab world to make it more hospitable to
western values, U.S. interests and Israel's territorial ambitions.

Since the latter part of
the 1990s, when they led the charge in Congress for the 1998 Iraq Liberation
Act (ILA), Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress (INC) was their chosen
instrument to achieve that transformation.

While no neocons were
appointed to cabinet-level positions under Bush, they obtained top posts in
the offices of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld – where Paul Wolfowitz was
named deputy defense secretary and Douglas Feith undersecretary for policy –
and Vice President Dick Cheney, whose chief of staff and national security
adviser was I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby.

On the White House National
Security Council staff, they were able to place former Iran-contra figure
Elliott Abrams and Robert Joseph in key positions dealing with the Middle
East and arms proliferation, respectively.

Rumsfeld's Defense Policy
Board (DPB) was dominated by neocons, notably its former chairman, Richard
Perle, former CIA chief James Woolsey, former arms-control negotiator
Kenneth Adelman and military historian Eliot Cohen.

Neocons, more than any
other group, pushed hardest for war in Iraq after 9/11 and predicted, backed
up by Chalabi's assurances, that the conflict would be, among other things,
a "cakewalk" and that U.S. troops would be greeted with "flowers and
sweets."

Within the administration,
the neocons, again relying heavily on Chalabi's INC, developed their own
intelligence analyses to bolster the notion of a link between former Iraqi
President Saddam Hussein and the al-Qaeda terrorist group, and exaggerated
Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction (WMD) to provide a more
credible pretext for war.

Their friends on the DPB
and in the media then stoked the public's fears about these threats through
frequent appearances on television and a barrage of newspaper columns and
magazine articles.

While analysts and regional
experts at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the State Department,
which had dropped Chalabi as a fraud and a con-man in the mid-1990s, tried
to resist the juggernaut, they were consistently outflanked by the neocons,
whose influence and ability to circumvent the professionals was greatly
enhanced by their access to Rumsfeld and Cheney, who served as their
champions in the White House and with Bush personally.

Their influence reached its
zenith in early April when Chalabi and 700 of his paid INC troops were
airlifted by the Pentagon to the southern city of Nasiriya on Cheney's
authority against Bush's stated policy that Washington would not favor one
Iraqi faction over another. Bush's own national security adviser,
Condoleezza Rice, professed surprise when informed of the move by reporters.

While they were still
riding high as U.S. troops consolidated their control of Iraq, the neocons'
star began to wane already last August when it became clear that their and
Chalabi's predictions about a grateful Iraqi populace were about as
well-founded as their certainties about Hussein's ties to al-Qaeda and his
WMD stockpiles.

Sensing trouble ahead, Rice
asked former ambassador to India, Robert Blackwill, to return to the White
House, where he had been her boss during the presidency of George HW Bush,
the current leader's father (1989-93). By October, she and he had formed an
inter-agency Iraq Stabilisation Group (ISG) that gradually wrested control
of Iraq policy from the Pentagon.

It was a process in which
Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) chief Paul Bremer, who had come to
detest Chalabi and his neocon backers in Baghdad and Washington, was an
enthusiastic participant and which was effectively completed with the
announcement late last month that the State Department was taking over the
$14 billion in reconstruction money for Iraq that the Pentagon has not yet
spent.

In the last month, the
neocon retreat has turned into a rout, particularly as reports of Chalabi's
coziness with Iran gained currency and, just as important, senior military
officers indicated that a military victory over the Iraqi insurgency was not
possible.

The public attention given
to a blistering attack on the neocons by the former chief of the U.S.
Central Command, Gen. Anthony Zinni, on the popular television program, 60
Minutes, also demonstrated that the media, ever cautious about taking on
powerful figures, now saw them as fair game.

When Perle, Woolsey and
several other neocons visited Rice at the White House on May 1 to protest
the shoddy treatment Chalabi was receiving at the hands of the CIA, Bremer
and the State Department, participants said she thanked them for their views
and offered nothing more. Neither Rumsfeld nor Cheney nor any of their
neocon aides attended.